What makes projects tick?

Monthly Archives: May 2014

Clear goals and feedback is a phrase I was reading in Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (apparently pronounced Mi High Cheek Sent Me High). This phrase got me thinking about how agile sprints work. Csikszentmihalyi talks about the near instant feedback of the tennis player. They know when they have succeeded in hitting the ball over the fence to their opponent. Working with user stories, I know when I have reached my goal thanks to the definition of done.

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to talk about emerging clarity of goals, where they “…are invented on the spot”. He makes reference to kids trying to gross eachother out or making fun of a teacher. The end goal is evolving. This brings me to a lesson I have learnt in applying agile. One of the most common failings I have seen is the lack of availability of the product owner. This talk of emerging goals gets me thinking about why the product owner needs to be there, not just to provide clear goals at the start (users stories or requirements in waterfall) but to make constant decisions and clarifications about relative priorities of user stories, alternative ways of delivering user stories and what the user story is trying to achieve.

The water around Cosne Sur Loire

So, when we have clear goals (or support from a product owner to clarify as needed) and feedback, we have a good chance of being totally absorbed in our work and experiencing flow. More on flow here.

I’m not sure it makes sense to apply conditioning to management practice (Is that naive? I’d welcome your views). That said, I think an awareness of conditioning can be useful in understanding behaviour, including in a work context.

Ultimately, I think if you are trying to manipulate your colleagues without their knowing then you have a lot bigger problems than low productivity or whatever you are trying to improve. Is there a way to apply an understanding of conditioning to the workplace and projects in particular? Yes, I think there is. Project teams and agile teams in particular are great at shaking things up and trying something new. I learnt in my lecture that Pavlov said that “the laws of classical conditioning are the laws of emotional life”. So, one example of using an understanding of classical conditioning to improve a work environment might be tackling situations where classical conditioning has lead to a pairing of a certain room or meeting format with stressful meetings. You can’t stop meetings being stressful by changing the room but, once the root cause has been dealt with, team members may still associate rooms or meeting formats with stressful experiences. Making simple changes at that point may be beneficial in moving on from stressful situations.

This is the limited kind of role I see for the application of an understanding of conditioning in the workplace to fix problems. I do wonder if classical conditioning can help us understand the effectiveness of the rituals in agile. Do these rituals in part prime our minds to be in a certain state (e.g. alert and focussed on our colleagues at stand-ups)? Not much on the application of operant conditioning here. I’ll have to give that some more thought later but it may be that it is just too manipulative to be appropriate.